Completely Hide GNOME Panel

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I’ve been doing a lot of customization lately with my GNOME installation, trying out new layouts and trying to gain as much screen real estate as I can. I came across an issue this morning in regards to the GNOME panel that I wanted to write down / publish. In the short article below I will describe how to completely hide the GNOME panel, allowing your applications to use 100% of the screen.

Autoide.. not 100%

Some of you might be thinking “Just click ‘Autohide” on the panel properties. How hard can it be?” The problem is that the default autohide still displays a few pixels, meaning your applications won’t extend to the absolute edge of the screen. When I tried it initially my panel still took 6px across the top. While that isn’t a lot, it still left a gap and was something I wanted to remove.

I found the value for this change within the gconf-editor. To ensure that your Autohide doesn’t continue to show any pixels (0 pixels), use the following command:

There are quite a few more “hidden” settings within the gconf-editor that allow you to change values not held within the normal Properties menu. I’ll have more of these to post in mid-October, after my GNOME presentation is finished for the Utah Open Source Conference.

I was looking for a way to toggle the panel today and I couldn’t find anything so eventually I found a way to write up my own script. This was the most recent article/thread on the topic that I found on the first page of Google so I figured I’d post this here.

Note: requires xdotool (which is one function that I find really useful btw for keyboard-shortcut scripts)

Also, I forgot to add the “. /” before the execution path. To run the script, run: “. /(chosen directory)/hidePanel.sh” without quotes. I should also mention that I’ve only tried this on Lucid (Ubuntu 10.04).

Configuring the Panel is always the first thing I do. However, there are limitations. For example, changing the color of the Panel (upper or lower panel) affects only one part of the Panel. The result is an anesthetically looking. The upper panel will be shown like three pieces: The part that contains “Applications”, Places” and “System” remains unchanged. Then only the middle part of the Panel cahnges the color; finally, the right part (containing the clock, calendar and swtich button,etc) also remains unchanged.

You can also use the value apps > panel > general > toplevel_id_list and remove the string [top_panel] from this string list. This will effectively remove the panel completely from the screen, as opposed to the object still being drawn on the desktop hidden and invisible.